Effective leadership draws on cognitive and social abilities that are not generated by the brain alone. The body — through its distributed neural networks, its continuous signalling to the brain, and its capacity for interoceptive awareness — is already doing significant work in how we make decisions, read people, and show up in a room. The task is not to add a new skill. It is to restore the connection to a processing system that is already running.
The previous article in this series established two distinct costs on leadership capacity: a body that is out of balance, sending distorted signals upward; and a mind that is not truly connected to those signals, filling gaps with what it already believes. This piece focuses on what becomes possible when we restore both.
How does the body function as a distributed intelligence system?
Intelligence is not confined to the brain. Our nervous system is distributed. According to Furness (2012) in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, the gut hosts a dense neural network — containing an estimated 500 million neurons — that coordinates digestion, responds to emotional and physiological states, and sends a constant stream of information upward to the brain. The heart has its own intrinsic nervous system, monitoring pressure, rhythm, and chemistry, and continuously updating brain regions involved in emotion and higher cognition.
These systems do not merely relay data. They pre-process. The signals they send upward — often felt as subtle shifts in mood, pull, aversion, or ease — are the nervous system's fast, integrated readouts of what is happening. What we casually call a "gut feeling" is often the output of this distributed processing, arriving faster than conscious analysis and carrying information that the thinking brain has not yet caught up with.
What are somatic markers, and why do they matter for decisions?
Antonio Damasio's work on the somatic marker hypothesis gives us a useful lens here. In his research, patients with damage to brain regions that integrate body signals into awareness could reason perfectly well on paper. They could list pros and cons, talk through scenarios, and explain trade-offs. But in real life, their decisions were erratic and often poor, according to Bechara, Damasio et al. in Science (1997).
What these patients appeared to have lost were somatic markers: bodily shifts — tightening, relaxation, heaviness, lightness — tagged to past experience and reactivated when similar options appear. Damasio's own summary of why this matters is characteristically direct:
"We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think." — Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist and author of Descartes' Error (Putnam, 1994)
Somatic markers:
arise from the body's distributed processing (gut, heart, viscera)
surface as a felt sense before we can fully explain why we feel that way
bias us toward some options and away from others, shaping where our "rational" analysis spends its energy
When somatic markers are available and we are attuned enough to notice them, they function like a fast, embodied scoring system overlaying the choice landscape. We can still interrogate or override them, but they are in the room. When they are muted or ignored, decision-making often becomes strangely flat: everything looks equally arguable, analysis multiplies, and choices either stall or collapse to narrow, surface-level criteria.
The difference shows up clearly in how a decision actually feels to make:
Decision-making | With somatic markers available | With somatic markers muted |
|---|---|---|
Speed | Faster narrowing to a few live options | Endless re-weighing of every option |
Conviction | Grounded sense of "this is the path" | Everything looks equally arguable |
Analysis | Reasoning guided toward what matters | Analysis multiplies without resolving |
Typical outcome | A clear, ownable choice | Stall, or a flat, surface-level default |
I've sat with leaders in exactly that state — where the data and arguments are all on the table, but no one can say, with grounded conviction, "This is the path that makes most sense." That missing conviction is often a missing somatic marker.
What does interoceptive accuracy predict in real-world performance?
Research from high-frequency trading environments shows what happens when interoceptive sensitivity is intact and actively used.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, traders were tested on their interoceptive accuracy: their ability to sense their own heartbeat without touching a pulse, while their actual heart rate was measured simultaneously. According to Kandasamy et al. in Scientific Reports (2016), those scores correlated with both profitability and years of survival in the markets.
The pattern was clear:
traders scored higher on interoceptive accuracy than matched non-trader controls
within the trading group, higher interoceptive accuracy predicted better profit-and-loss performance
interoceptive accuracy also predicted how long traders had successfully stayed in the markets
Over time, more experienced traders tended to have higher interoceptive scores, suggesting the environment was selecting for — and potentially implicitly training — this capacity.
The point is not that intuition magically beats models. It is that in environments of high uncertainty and rapid feedback, being able to read subtle internal signals becomes a real performance advantage. Their bodies were giving them an additional channel of information about risk, timing, and fit — and the most successful traders were the ones listening to it.
How does interoceptive training affect decision quality?
Beyond the trading evidence, experimental research increasingly links interoceptive accuracy to better performance on decision tasks involving risk, ambiguity, and delayed rewards. People with higher interoceptive accuracy — measured by heartbeat detection tasks — tend to perform better on these tasks than those with lower sensitivity.
In one intervention study, Sugawara et al. (2020) in BioPsychoSocial Medicine found that a single week of interoceptive training sharpened people's heartbeat perception and reduced their anxiety and somatic complaints — and that the people whose interoceptive accuracy improved most were also the ones whose decision-making shifted most toward the rational. This suggests interoceptive awareness is not a soft, optional extra. It behaves like an underlying capacity that helps our cognitive skills express themselves under pressure and uncertainty.
This is the awareness pillar of nervous system intelligence — the foundation on which everything else builds. Reading our own state clearly, and trusting what we register, is not a personality trait. It is a trainable skill.
How does body connection shape how we read other people?
Interoception is not only about knowing our own state. It also shapes how accurately we perceive other people and the environment.
The insula — the brain's primary hub for processing internal body signals — is also heavily involved in social and emotional perception. It activates when we sense our own internal shifts, and it activates when we witness other people's emotional states. The same circuitry we use to sense ourselves is involved in sensing others.
When we are out of contact with our own body signals, we dampen the very channels that help us read the room. According to Critchley and Garfinkel in Current Opinion in Psychology (2017), research on heart rate variability supports this: higher vagal tone — a marker of a more flexible, well-regulated nervous system — is associated with better performance on tasks that require inferring other people's emotions from minimal cues.
If we have a live connection to our own body, we can begin to differentiate:
"This agitation is mine" versus "This is mostly what I am absorbing from the room"
"My unease belongs to the actual content of the decision" versus "My unease is tied to someone else's anxiety sitting in my system"
Without that discernment, we still feel something — but we are more likely to misattribute it, folding it quietly into our story about the strategy, the person, or ourselves.
What does presence actually mean, neurologically?
Presence is not a performance skill. It is a state of nervous system organisation in which our perception is richer and less filtered by prediction.
When we are genuinely present, several things tend to happen in the brain:
default mode activity drops, meaning less self-referential noise and mental time-travel
interoceptive regions, including the insula, become more active and better connected
sensory networks engage more fully, so more of what is actually happening makes it into awareness
In that mode, somatic markers have a better chance of reaching consciousness, early signs of stress or misalignment show up sooner, and subtle shifts in a team, a stakeholder, or a negotiation become easier to pick up. We have more access to actual data — internal and external — and are less governed by autopilot narratives.
Can interoceptive awareness be developed?
The most important takeaway is that interoception and presence are not fixed traits. They can be trained.
A range of approaches has shown evidence of benefit:
Targeted interoceptive training (for example, heartbeat-based awareness exercises)
Mindfulness and attention-training practices, which increase activity in interoceptive regions
Body-based modalities such as body scans, yoga, and somatic movement
Nervous-system-focused tools like HRV biofeedback and breath-based practices
We do not need to master all of these. What matters is building enough familiarity with our own internal landscape that we can:
notice early signals of "offness" rather than only late-stage overwhelm
sense the somatic texture of a decision, not only think it through on paper
read the room and pick up what is not being said
distinguish between what belongs to us and what we are absorbing from others
bring ourselves back into a workable zone when we have tipped too far into activation or shutdown
The next article in this series looks specifically at breath — why it is the most direct and immediately accessible entry point into this whole system, and what the research says about how and why it works.
Our body is already a key contributor to our best judgement. Our task is to clear enough bandwidth to hear it — and to treat its signals not as noise to push through, but as information to include.
Sources & further reading
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D. & Damasio, A. R. Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275(5304), 1293–1295 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.275.5304.1293
Damasio, A. R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam, 1994. (Somatic marker hypothesis, passim.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error
Kandasamy, N., Garfinkel, S. N., Page, L., et al. Interoceptive ability predicts survival on a London trading floor. Scientific Reports, 6, 32986 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep32986
Furness, J. B. The enteric nervous system and neurogastroenterology. Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 9, 286–294 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrgastro.2012.32
Critchley, H. D. & Garfinkel, S. N. Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.020
Sugawara, A., Terasawa, Y., Katsunuma, R. & Sekiguchi, A. Effects of interoceptive training on decision making, anxiety, and somatic symptoms. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 14, 7 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-020-00179-7
Tinello, D., Kliegel, M. & Zuber, S. Does Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Enhance Executive Functions Across the Lifespan? A Systematic Review. Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, 6(1), 126–142 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-021-00218-3
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the somatic marker hypothesis?
Proposed by Antonio Damasio, the somatic marker hypothesis describes how bodily signals — tightening, relaxation, heaviness, lightness — tagged to past experience become available when similar situations arise, guiding decisions before conscious analysis is complete. Patients who lost access to these signals could reason fluently but made systematically poor decisions in real life.
What is interoception and why does it matter for leaders?
Interoception is the ability to sense physiological signals originating inside the body — heart rate, breathing, visceral tension, ease. Research shows that higher interoceptive accuracy predicts better performance on decision tasks involving risk and uncertainty. A study of high-frequency traders found it also predicted profitability and years of survival in the markets.
Can interoceptive awareness be trained?
Yes. Targeted interoceptive exercises, mindfulness and attention training, body-based practices, and HRV biofeedback have all shown evidence of improving interoceptive sensitivity. Even one week of focused interoceptive training has been shown to improve heartbeat detection accuracy, reduce anxiety, and improve performance on decision-making tasks.
How does body disconnection affect the ability to read people?
The insular cortex — the brain’s primary hub for interoception — is the same region involved in detecting other people’s emotional states. When we are out of contact with our own body signals, we dampen that channel. Research on HRV shows that higher vagal tone (a marker of a more regulated nervous system) is associated with better performance on tasks that require inferring others’ emotions from minimal cues.
What does “presence” mean neurologically?
Presence is not a performance technique. Neurologically, it describes a brain state in which the default mode network (self-referential thought, mental time-travel) is less active, interoceptive regions are better engaged, and sensory networks are more fully online. In that state, somatic markers have a better chance of reaching consciousness, and perception of the environment is richer and less distorted by prior expectation.